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A lot of how-tos read like recipes, and as such I’ve often thought recipes would work greatly with the open source model: sharing and remixing recipes via the internet. You may be familiar with Free Beer and Open Cola – well, Open Source food.com brings open source recipes such as these together in a repository, not dissimilar to how Sourceforge functions for software, Ponoko functions for laser cut products and Instructables functions for, well, anything!

The popular recipes have a healthy amount of commenting although there is a marked difference between recipes and other designed products in that in the software, hardware and product world we are normally working towards some kind of spec. Open source food projects are noticeably looser – the one spec being that they should taste good, I assume! As such I imagine the site functions more as a directory for users and inspiration for more creative cooks, taking a bite from this recipe, a soupÃ§on from another, to make yet another.

All recipes are released under Creative Commons licenses and there are all the usual web 2.0 databasing benefits of tags, voting, and popularity ranking. Essential viewing for any foodies, along with the trusty BBC food search! Sorry about that pun by the way…